The overall goal of the proposed research is to understand the origins and early development of object permanence in infancy. The more specific goals are to conduct further tests of a curious phenomenon reported by Bower, namely that young infants who cannot find an object when it is hidden under a cloth will nonetheless successfully recover an object when it is hidden from view by extinguishing the room lights. From these data, Bower has concluded that "out of sight is not out of mind" for the young infant, and that the traditional problem of object permanence is no problem at all. Two experiments are proposed. In study 1, we test "reaching in the dark" at 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 months of age under two experimental conditions: (a) when the infant is already in-action reaching for the object, and (b) when they are out-of-action and thus must initiate their reach on the basis of some stored representation of the perceptually absent object. It is argued that because Bower did not adequately control this aspect of the experiment, his results may be due to infants continuing a reach-in-progress and conceiving of a permanent object when it was hidden in the darkened room. Study 2 will further explore the relation between Bower's new reaching-in-the-dark task and the standard object performance task. Specifically, it will compare infants' success in the two tasks, once the tasks are equated by eliminating potential motor skill problems in removing occluders. Again, we argue that the results from the two tasks may be more compatible once task demands are more carefully controlled. The ways in which the proposed studies will enrich our understanding of object permanence development are high-lighted.